Overview

In his latest soul-chilling novel, bestselling author Peter Straub tells of a famous children’s book author who, in the wake of a grotesque accident, realizes that the most basic facts of her existence, including her existence itself, have come into question. Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind–again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that...

More About
This Book

Overview

In his latest soul-chilling novel, bestselling author Peter Straub tells of a famous children’s book author who, in the wake of a grotesque accident, realizes that the most basic facts of her existence, including her existence itself, have come into question.
Willy Patrick, the respected author of the award-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind–again. One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead.On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth–people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy’s tragic loss and the story in Tim’s manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.

Editorial Reviews

Bob Minzesheimer

A lot of characters and subplots compete for attention -- at times too many for my taste -- but the story never lags, with an angry angel and the ghost of Underhill's murdered sister and weird e-mails sent to Underhill by the recently deceased … In the Night Room is packed with interesting stuff.
— USA Today

Christopher Rice

Somewhere around the hundredth page, In the Night Room becomes the kind of fast-paced, deftly plotted novel that defies critical synopsis, lest the reader's experience of it be spoiled. What follows is a riveting and elegiac journey, as Underhill and Willy travel to visit the scenes of those crimes that served as the source material for his novel, which has evoked the wrath of a vengeful spirit whose brief, bone-chilling appearances are rendered vividly and precisely. In the process, Straub takes readers to a place where fact and fiction are blended by flows of grief. The result is not only a powerful and arresting foray into the dark fantastic, but also a novel that manages to provide a deeply personal glimpse into its author's psyche without sacrificing narrative and suspense.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

In Black House, Straub and Stephen King wrote of "slippage," whereby the borders between reality and fantasy blur. This entire brilliant novel is an act of slippage. In this sequel to last year's lost boy lost girl, and further chapter in the ongoing adventures of Straub protagonist Tim Underhill (Koko, etc.), the most intellectually adventurous of dark fantasy authors takes the apparent slippage of the prequel-in which Underhill's experience of a slain nephew's survival at the hands of a serial killer was indicated to be compensatory imagining by Underhill-several steps into the impressively weird. Underhill, an author, here encounters not the mere survival of a dead relation but the existence of a character he's creating in his journals. Dark fantasy cognescenti will remember that King employed a somewhat similar device in The Dark Half, but Straub's approach is distinctly his own, directed at mining the ambiguous relationship between nature and art, fact and fiction, the real and the ideal. The character Underhill has brought into being is Willy Bryce Patrick, a children's book author soon to be married to coldhearted financier Mitchell Faber, at least until Willy discovers that Faber had her first family murdered. Willy, whom Tim meets during a bookstore reading of his latest novel, lost boy lost girl, believes she is real (as does the reader for the book's first third), and learns otherwise only through Tim's painful, patient revelations. The two fall in deeply in love, but their passion seems doomed-not only is Willy's existence tenuous, but the pair are being pursued with murderous intent by Faber and his goons, as the former is in fact one form of the serial killer of lost boy lost girl, Joseph Kalendar; moreover, a terrible angel is insisting that only when Underhill makes an ultimate sacrifice, righting a wrong he did to Kalendar in lost boy lost girl, will matters resolve. Moving briskly while ranging from high humor to the blackest dread, this is an original, astonishingly smart and expertly entertaining meditation on imagination and its powers; one of the very finest works of Straub's long career, it's a sure bet for future award nominations. Agent, David Gernert. (Oct. 26) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Giving us the creeps again (after lost boy, lost girl), Straub concocts the tale of two authors who seems to be getting important communications from the beyond. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The "lives" lived by a novelist's creations intersect and conflict in this tricky sequel to last year's lost boy lost girl. Successful writer and troubled Vietnam vet Tim Underhill (who's been popping up in Straub's fiction ever since 1988's Koko) is troubled by cryptic e-mail messages from unidentified domains that, he slowly realizes, seem to have been sent by former acquaintances who've recently died. In a parallel plot, widowed Willy Patrick, Newberry Award-winning author of the YA fantasy novel In the Night Room, undergoes a series of traumatic misadventures that, taken together, suggest very sinister things about Mitchell Faber, the suave globetrotting executive she plans to marry. Early clues point to further links between Tim and Willy, and when they "meet" at a bookstore where he's giving a reading, this rather preposterously convoluted tale's metafictional intentions are made clear. It all has to do with a "mistake" made by Tim in an earlier novel (involving a soulless serial killer)-as Tim is made to understand, by such bizarre figures as a "pissed-off angel" of more than angelic strength and beauty, a most curiously named book collector who becomes his stalker, and a "Familiar Spirit" who establishes contact with Tim via-what else?: e-mail. Willy Patrick's precise connection to the "flight-from-Bluebeard narrative" that is Tim's current work-in-progress is more than a bit overelaborated, as the two novelists travel to Tim's hometown for his brother's wedding, a visit to a sinister abandoned house where horrendous crimes were committed, and the resolution of Willy's understandably imperfect grasp of her own reality. Readers of Straub's previous fiction will eventually tumble towhat's going on-but may well wonder whether the muted payoff was worth so much mazelike artifice. Straub can still tease the imagination and chill the blood with the best of them. But it's probably time to bury Tim Underhill, and move on. Agent: David Gernert/Gernert Company

Read an Excerpt

1

About 9:45 on a Wednesday morning early in a rain-drenched September, a novelist named Timothy Underhill gave up, in more distress than he cared to acknowledge, on his ruined breakfast and the New York Times crossword puzzle and returned, far behind schedule, to his third-floor loft at 55 Grand Street. Closing his door behind him did nothing to calm his troubled heart. He clanked his streaming umbrella into an upright metal stand, transported a fresh cup of decaffeinated coffee to his desk, parked himself in a flexi- ble mesh chair bristling with controls, double-clicked on Outlook
Express’s arrow-swathed envelope, and, with the sense of finally putting most of his problem behind him, called to the surface of his screen the day’s first catch of e-mails, ten in all. Two of them were completely inexplicable. Because the messages seemed to come from strangers (with names unattached to specific domains, he would notice later), bore empty subject lines, and consisted of no more than a couple of disconnected words each, he promptly deleted them.

As soon as he had done so, he remembered dumping a couple of similar e-mails two days earlier. For a moment, what he had seen from the sidewalk outside the Fireside Diner flared again before him, wrapped in every bit of its old urgency and dread.

2

In a sudden shaft of brightness that fell some twenty miles northwest of Grand Street, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick (soon to be Faber) was turning her slightly dinged little Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice, to drive two and two-tenths miles along Union Street’s increasingly vacant blocks instead of proceeding directly home. When she reached a vast parking lot with two sedans trickling through its exit, she checked her rearview mirror and looked around before driving in. Irregular slicks of water gleamed on the black surface of the lot. The men waiting to drive out of the lot took in the blond, shaggy-haired woman moving through their field of vision at the wheel of a sleek, snub-nosed car; one of them thought he was looking at a teenaged boy.

Willy drifted along past the penitentiary-like building that dominated the far end of the parking lot. Her shoulders rode high and tight, and her upper arms seemed taut as cords. Like all serious compulsions, hers seemed both a necessary part of her character and to have been wished upon her by some indifferent deity. Willy pulled in to an empty space and, now at the heart of her problem, regarded what was before her: a long, shabby-looking brick structure, three stories high, with wide metal doors and ranks of filthy windows concealed behind cobwebs of mesh. Around the back, she knew, the dock that led into the loading bays protruded outward, like a pier over the surface of a lake. A row of grimy letters over the topmost row of windows spelled out michigan produce.

Somehow, that had been the start of her difficulties: michigan produce, the words, not the building, which appeared to be a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable warehouse. Two days earlier, driving along inattentively, in fact in one of her “dazes,” her “trances”–Mitchell Faber’s words–Willy had found herself here, on this desolate section of Union Street, and the two words atop the big grimy structure had all but peeled themselves off the warehouse, set themselves on fire, and floated aflame toward her through the slate-colored air.

Willy had the feeling that she had been led here, that her “trance” had been charged with purpose, and that she had been all along meant to come across this building.

She wondered if this kind of thing ever happened to someone else. Almost instantly, Willy dismissed the strange little vision that blazed abruptly in her mind, of a beautiful, dark-haired teenaged boy, skateboard in one hand, standing dumbstruck on a sunlit street before an empty, ordinary-looking building. Her imagination had always been far too willing to leap into service, whether or not at the time imagination was actually useful. That sometimes it had been supremely useful to Willy did not diminish her awareness that her imaginative faculty could also turn on her, savagely. Oh, yes. You never knew which was the case, either, until the dread began to crawl up your arms.

The image of a teenaged boy and an empty house added to the sum of disorder at large in the universe, and she sent it back to the mysterious realm from which it had emerged. Because: hey, what might be in that empty house?

3

The memory of the messages he had seen on Monday awakened Tim Underhill’s curiosity, and before going on to answer the few of the day’s e-mails that required responses, he clicked on Deleted
Items, of which he seemed now to have accumulated in excess of two thousand, and looked for the ones that matched those he had just received. There they were, together in the order in which he had deleted them: Huffy and presten, with the blank subject lines that indicated a kind of indifference to protocol he wished he did not find mildly annoying. He clicked on the first message.
From: Huffy

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 8:52 AM

Subject:

re member

That was the opposite of dis member, Tim supposed, and dis member was the guy standing next to dat member. He tried the second one.

From: presten

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, September 1, 2003 9:01 AM

Subject:

no helo

Useless, meaningless, a nuisance. Huffy and presten were kids who had figured out how to hide their e-mail addresses. Presumably they had learned his from the website mentioned on the jacket of his latest book. He looked again at the two e-mails he had just dumped.

From: rudderless

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:32 AM

Subject:

no time

and

From: loumay

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 6:41 AM

Subject:

there wuz

There wuz, wuz there? All of these enigmatic messages sounded as though their perpetrators were half asleep, or as though their hands had been snatched off the keyboard–maybe by the next customer at some Internet café, since the second messages came only minutes after the first ones.

What were the odds that four people savvy enough to delete the second half of their e-mail addresses would decide, more or less simultaneously, to send early-morning gibberish to the same person? And how much steeper were the odds against one of them writing “no helo,” whatever that meant, and another deciding, with no prior agreement, upon the echo-phrase “no time”? Although he thought such a coincidence was impossible, he still felt mildly uneasy as he rejected it.

Because that left only two options, and both raised the ante. Either the four people who’d sent the e-mails to him were acting together in conspiracy, or the e-mails had all been sent by the same person using four names.

The names, Huffy, presten, rudderless, loumay, suggested no pattern. They were not familiar. A moment later, Tim remembered that back in his hometown, Millhaven, Illinois, a boy named Paul Resten had been his teammate on the Holy Sepulchre football team. Paulie Resten had been a chaotic little fireplug with greasy hair, a shoplifting problem, and a tendency toward violence. It seemed profoundly unlikely that after a silence of forty-odd years Paulie would send him a two-word e-mail. Tim read the messages over again, thought for a second, then rearranged them:

re member

there wuz

no helo

no time

which could just as easily have been

re member

there wuz

no time

no helo

or

there wuz

no time

no helo

re member

Not much of an advance, was it? The possibility that “helo” could be a typo for “help” came to mind. Remember, there was no time, no help. Whatever the hell that was about, it was pretty depressing. Also depressing was the notion that four people had decided to send him that disjointed message. If Tim felt like getting depressed, he had merely to think of his brother, Philip, who, not much more than one year after his wife’s suicide and the disappearance of his son, had announced his impending marriage to one China Beech, a born-again Christian whom Philip had met shortly after her emergence from the chrysalis of an exotic dancer. On the whole, Tim decided, he’d rather think about the inexplicable e-mails.

They had the stale, slightly staid aura of a Sherlock Holmes setup. Faintly, the rusty machinery of a hundred old detective novels could be heard, grinding into what passed for life. Nonetheless, in the twenty-first century any such thing had to be seen as a possible threat. At the very least, a malign hacker could have compromised the security of his system.

When his antivirus program discovered no loathsome substance hidden within his folders and files, Tim procrastinated a little further by calling his computer guru, Myron Dorot-Rivage. Myron looked like a Spaniard, and he spoke with a surprisingly musical German accent. He had rescued Tim and his companions at 55 Grand from multiple catastrophes.

Amazingly, Myron answered his phone on the second ring. “So, Tim,” he said, being equipped with infallible caller ID as well as a headset, “tell me your problem. I am booked solid for at least the next three days, but perhaps we can solve it over the phone.”

“It isn’t exactly a computer problem.”

“You are calling me about a personal problem, Tim?”

Momentarily, Tim considered telling his computer guru about what had happened that morning on West Broadway. Myron would have no sympathy for any problem that involved a ghost. He said, “I’ve been getting weird e-mails,” and described the four messages. “My virus check came up clean, but I’m still a little worried.”

“You probably won’t get a virus unless you open an attachment. Are you bothered by the anonymity?”

“Well, yeah. How do they do that, leave out their addresses? Is that legal?”

“Legal schmegal. I could arrange the same thing for you, if you were willing to pay for it. But what I cannot do is trace such an e-mail back to its source. These people pay their fees for a reason, after all!”

Myron drew in his breath, and Tim heard the clatter of metal against metal. It was like talking to an obstetrician who was delivering a baby.

After hanging up, Tim noticed that three new e-mails had arrived since his last look at his in-box. The first, Monster Oral Sex Week, undoubtedly offered seven days’ free access to a porn site; the second, 300,000 Customers, almost certainly linked to an e-mail database; the third, nayrm, made the skin on his forearms prickle. The Sex and the Customers disappeared unopened into the landfill of deleted mail. As he had dreaded, nayrm proved, when clicked upon, to have arrived without the benefit of a filled-in subject line or identifiable e-mail address. It had been sent at 10:58 a.m. and consisted of three words:

Your Rating:

Your Recommendations:

Barnes & Noble.com Review Rules

Our reader reviews allow you to share your comments on titles you liked,
or didn't, with others. By submitting an online review, you are representing to
Barnes & Noble.com that all information contained in your review is original
and accurate in all respects, and that the submission of such content by you
and the posting of such content by Barnes & Noble.com does not and will not
violate the rights of any third party. Please follow the rules below to help
ensure that your review can be posted.

Reviews by Our Customers Under the Age of 13

We highly value and respect everyone's opinion concerning the titles we offer.
However, we cannot allow persons under the age of 13 to have accounts at BN.com or
to post customer reviews. Please see our Terms of Use for more details.

What to exclude from your review:

Please do not write about reviews, commentary, or information posted on the product page. If you see any errors in the
information on the product page, please send us an email.

Reminder:

- By submitting a review, you grant to Barnes & Noble.com and its
sublicensees the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use the
review in accordance with the Barnes & Noble.com Terms of Use.

- Barnes & Noble.com reserves the right not to post any review -- particularly
those that do not follow the terms and conditions of these Rules. Barnes & Noble.com
also reserves the right to remove any review at any time without notice.

You have successfully created your Pen Name. Start enjoying the benefits of the BN.com Community today.

Sort by:
Showing
all of
18
Customer Reviews

SoonerOK

Posted May 8, 2011

Pass on this one

I have read a lot of Peter traub's books and this as probably one of the worst. Disjointed and disconneed - I had to start over a few times and was constatntly saying - where am I?? I just couldn't put this all together. He has written much better books - for good PS stories, pick something else - pass on this.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted June 2, 2006

Straub does it again

Once again Peter Straub comes through with a well thought story. While amateur readers may have a hard time following what is going on I thoroughly enjoyed the twists and turns in his plot. I purchased In the Night Room without being aware of lost boy, lost girl which I think will be another good read. Having been hooked into becoming a Straub fan after he co-authored the Talisman with Stephen King, I have enjoyed everything of his I have read to some degree or another and have never been let down by his work. I am an extensive and voracious reader and feel well equipped to write reviews.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted October 11, 2005

Welll...

While it was excellently written, I couldn't really get into it. The writing, at times, was almost too dense to really delve into. I suspect that after 20 years of reading S. King, I expected the language to be similar. At times it was, but 'Straub' delivers more an an intellectual read...and I just wanted the familiar. I didn't finish it.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Great horror novel

Willy Patrick should be ecstatic as she has found love again with wealthy businessman Michael Faber especially since he has moved her into his mini-mansion in Hendersonia, New Jersey. Still the young adult author has some issues for instance she has to fight herself from busting into a warehouse where she feels her dead daughter waits for her. Defeating the compulsion, Willy returns to her new home only to find pictures of her deceased spouse in a box in Michael¿s study, a room she never entered before............................... Stunned, she flees to New York. She enters a Barnes & Noble bookstore where horror author Timothy Underhill is providing a reading. Timothy¿s life has been unsettled of late since he saw his dead sister¿s ghost, communicated by email with a being from another dimension, and meeting an angry angel. When Timothy sees Willy, he recognizes her as the key person to fight evil waiting for them in the house of a deceased serial killer in their hometown of Millhaven................................ Not since GHOST STORY and the TALISMAN has Peter Straub written a more terrifying and chilling horror novel than IN THE NIGHT ROOM. The tale uses characters from LOST BOY, LOST GIRL and weaves them into a future story. The protagonist ¿wrote¿ that novel, but made a glaring error that needs correction so that there is no leakage between dimensions that could cause a pandemic. Readers will feel for Timothy as he has to pay a steep price to rectify his transgressions. Mr. Straub is at the top of his game with this powerfully pathos and poignant tale......................... Harriet Klausner

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 31, 2013

Good reading

Really enjoyed this book. It kept me hooked until the end and I would recommend this for others to purchase.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted November 26, 2011

Loved it

Very involved ties up a few things about loso boy/lost girl yet creats new plot

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Review by www.cymlowell.blogspot.com

Imagine that you are a writer discovering the personalities of the characters that you have created or which have evolved as you unearthed your story. Is it possible that you could fall in love with a character, who could appear to be a dream come true as he or she emerges from the mists of your mind? Or maybe the protagonist has come from such a dreadful place that you want to find a way to salve the miseries in her or his soul. And what if you were so entranced with the intersection of fiction and reality that you wanted to merge the milieu to bring the fictional characters into your own world of supposed reality?

This is the road that Peter Straub masterfully traverses in his thought-provoking, excellent novel In the Night Room. The story could appear to be a mystery or an expose of the day-to-day realities of a prominent writer, sometimes pursued by sycophantic fans. Or it could be a romance as the hero of the story, a famous author of course, falls in love with the woman who is the heroine and who, herself, is a well known author.

The story lines of each of these stories emerge in clever sequence. I found myself wondering what was real vs. imagination of the various writers. As a writer, one inevitably becomes involved with characters, provided that they have reality to the writer. How could this not be the case, as one seeks to understand the motivations and actions of the personalities that provide life to an otherwise dull background narrative.

"Story-within-story" is a well accepterd means of storytelling. My own favorite is Willa Cather's adventure set within The Professor's House. In In the Night Room, Mr. Straub takes this an interesting step further to blend the stories into a fascinating narrative.

If you enjoy envisioning how writer's write and think as they compose their stories, as I do for sure, you will be as fascinated with this book as was I.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Peter Straub

In the night room, isn't a sequel to the great novel Lost Boy, Lost Girl. But its what you called a connector, meaning it is somehow connected to Lost Boy, Lost Girl.

In this particular book Tim Underhill is a famous writer,working on his latest invention. He's still haunted by his nephew's disappearance and he still has trouble dealing with the events surrounding his disappearance. He's also receiving strange e-mails from what seems to be an angel, weird cryptic messages that are telling him that his last book angered the other world, something he must now remedy.

Meanwhile, Willy is still haunted by the death of her husband and daughter. But when she realizes that the man she is now supposed to marry might have murdered her ex-husband, her whole world tumbles down into oblivion.

The two stories connect and collide eventually, but it collides in away that you never see COMING. But I cant explain anymore, cause if I do it will be damper to the story.

Peter Straub went all out with this story. The creativity and the collaboration of the book is phenomenal.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Anonymous

Posted January 9, 2005

a great novel, in any genre

When I read Lost Boy, Lost Girl, i was glad and worried for Peter Straub at the same time. Because the book was great, & I was afraid he was never gonna be able to do better. Fortunatly, i was wrong. Here it is : IN THE NIGHT ROOM, better than the best. Thanks Peter keep on writing!

Was this review helpful? YesNoThank you for your feedback.Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.